I. Tight Spaces
Lately I’ve been thinking obsessively about the variant landscapes of our lives: cultural landscapes, political landscapes, social landscapes, and of course, the physical earthen landscape. Each restrictive in its own way; all these partitioned spaces in which to squeeze these enormous American ideals, like forcing an oversized square peg into an unwavering round hole.
Of course, much of this project has brought frontward my feelings of transience and stability: what things make a home, and what role absence plays in our temporal landscape. It hasn’t all been pleasant, but I’m grateful to have experienced it. Isn’t it a romantic notion of home when a person can feel the illusion of being fixed in place? After all, aren’t we spinning on a giant ball of molten rock with an impossibly thin atmosphere?
II. Invoking The Traditional
When I think of traditional landscapes, immediately Bierstadt, Constable, or Friedrich come to mind with the large, sweeping skies over mountains, rivers, forests and wide-open plains; very rarely are these paintings absent of people doing things. In a way, these landscapes, while beautiful, deliver a sense of propaganda. And maybe I’m referencing the social response to the Industrial Revolution, where these artists were forewarning the reckless and somehow voluntary disassociation from something eminently part of us: nature.
And here we are today: two hundred plus years post-Revolution, after having displaced nature’s energy from the earth to the sky, and then wandering around with our hands in the air as if we can’t understand why things feel so wrong, so unusually hot, so uncomfortably wet. All the way to the bank we go in awkward perplexity: It’s a mystery.
III. Stitching It Together
So with this kind of estranged American position, I thought I’d like to try abstracting the landscape as a side investigation while passages travels to winter solstice.
First, I had this nagging idea to try collaging old paintings into a new one:
But I loved neither the process nor the result. Everything about it felt clumsy, and because I work on 100% cotton, the paper didn’t tear in a way that I liked or could control sufficiently. During this process, however, I thought “it’d be just great if I could hole-punch my way through the old paintings, then arrange the pieces accordingly.” So I tried.
I started with a regular single hole punch.
Hole-punching old watercolor paintings was incredibly satisfying. I was able to use almost every last bit of the original painting, then stuff the pieces into a tiny plastic bag, a sort of transparent urn comprising “ash” to forge a future phoenix.
I then bought an array of geometric hole punches in a variety of sizes. I started out with one-sixth inch square, which (again) was very satisfying to punch, but terribly time-consuming to lay out. I found square punch in half-inch, three-quarter inch, one-inch and just recently Justin found a two-and-a-half inch square. I also bought equilateral triangles in one-sixth inch and three-quarter inch.
I started out with the one-sixth inch squares, made a mockup of a random photo, graphed the background and tried to follow the pattern, but got lost along the way. I learned a lot, though, and immediately sought a bigger square.
Some things I loved about these starter studies is that the paper visually transformed to stone reinforcing the idea of mosaic. It was totally unexpected, but well-received by this audience of one. Further, the combined weight of the former paintings and the substrate of post-consumer cardboard provided a surprisingly substantial combined weight. These small collages have heft.
The next step was to use larger squares and/ or triangles to see how (or if) the shapes could work together. I made several unglued mockups just puzzling everything together, but really liked the way these started to work out, so I glued them down.
The triangle punch makes a very nice hexagon, and I think I can incorporate a similar-sized square, but it will take some math and experimentation. I did find that I could get pretty far with one-sized square and cutting the right triangles myself but it’s a little difficult to get them to match up at the corners if I have to cut by hand. That said, this is handiwork, and imperfection is part of the beauty. But, still: I want.
For now, I will continue using the sky as a point of departure as I explore potential patterns and tessellations. I think in the same way the ghost buildings hold space as elusive symbols of stability in passages, the allusion of traditional craft and the echo of familiar shapes might draft our old stories in new ways.
At least, maybe.
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